Slaves Tell Tales

Download or read book Slaves Tell Tales written by Sara Forsdyke and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-22 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author argues that various forms of popular culture in ancient Greece--including festival revelry, oral storytelling, and popular forms of justice--were a vital medium for political expression and played an important role in the negotiation of relations between elites and masses, as well as masters and slaves, in the Greek city-states. Although these forms of social life are only poorly attested in the sources, she suggests that Greek literature reveals traces of popular culture that can be further illuminated by comparison with later historical periods. By looking beyond institutional contexts, she recovers the ways that groups that were excluded from the formal political sphere--especially women and slaves--participated in the process by which society was ordered.